Major portion of New South Wales blaze sparked by ordnance drill

Aussie military blamed for fire

SPRINGWOOD, AUSTRALIA – A water-bombing aircraft crashed on Thursday as the furious mayor of the area worst hit by Australia’s bush fire emergency demanded answers after the military was blamed for starting a massive blaze.

Thousands of largely volunteer firefighters have been battling infernos for more than a week across the state of New South Wales. The fires have destroyed over 200 homes, with the Blue Mountains region west of Sydney the focal point.

Cooler weather was helping Thursday, with major blazes downgraded, although authorities urged communities not to be complacent with 66 fires still alight, 24 of them uncontained.

So far only one person has died, although there were fears for the pilot of a fixed-wing aircraft that went down in a remote area south of Sydney as it responded to a blaze near Ulladulla.

One of the biggest and fiercest infernos still alight — which has a perimeter of more than 300 km and has ripped through 47,000 hectares of land — was started by the military, a fire service investigation found.

The huge blaze, near Lithgow, was a major worry this week with authorities on Tuesday deciding to deliberately merge it through back burning with another nearby fire at Mount Victoria to pre-empt a deterioration in conditions.

NSW Rural Fire Service chief Shane Fitzsimmons said an official investigation found it was started by exploding ordnance on a live firing range on Wednesday last week.

“It wasn’t deliberate, it was a side effect of a routine activity . . . and clearly there was no intention to see fire start up and run as a result of that activity,” he said, adding that the military had fully cooperated.

The defense department is yet to comment on the findings, but Blue Mountains Mayor Mark Greenhill was furious.

“I would have thought the community of the Blue Mountains is owed something,” he told ABC television, adding that residents lived in fear for a week.

“I would have hoped on a day like that which was a dry day, a hot day, with the winds — the Australian military would have known it wasn’t a good time to be igniting.

“The fire has caused great concern to my community, it’s done damage to my community and it just shouldn’t have happened.”

So far, more than 124,000 hectares of land has been burned across NSW in its worst bush fire emergency in nearly 50 years.

After dire warnings that extreme heat and strong winds would cause chaos on Wednesday, the high-risk strategies of aggressive back burning, building containment lines and strategic planning averted what was been feared to be a major disaster.

“There is no immediate threat across any of our fire grounds to people at this stage, but because they’re (the major fires) all at ‘watch and act,’ that signals that circumstances could change,” said Fitzsimmons.

While homes have been destroyed, human fatalities have been minimized as residents heeded advice either to flee or seek refuge at evacuation centers.

With authorities beginning to scale down their mammoth eight-day fight, Fitzsimmons thanked all involved and apologized to people returning to gutted homes in the Blue Mountains.

“On behalf of the firefighters who are doing it so tough up there, we do apologize and regret that we weren’t able to save everything.

“We are very acutely aware, because our teams are embedded in those local communities . . . there has been so much damage and destruction and people have lost everything.